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Recasting the Tribe of Ishmael
The Role of Indianapolis's Nineteenth-Century Poor in Twentieth-Century Eugenics
ELSA F. KRAMER
And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael, because the Lord hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.
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| Genesis 16:11–12 |
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| Rainy weather and muddy streets kept many of his flock home on Sunday morning, January 20, 1878, when Rev. Oscar C. McCulloch of Indianapolis's Plymouth Congregational Church delivered a sermon on the problem of the city's poor.1 Charity was not an unusual topic within his congregation, which practiced the Social Gospel of applied Christianity—"the alleviation, by physical and spiritual means," as McCulloch's daughter, Ruth, would later explain it, "of poverty, ignorance, misery, vice and crime."2 This particular lecture, however, reflected a change in his approach to welfare, away from almsgiving and toward the exclusion of applicants deemed unworthy of relief. |
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It was coincidence that had brought about this key shift in the well-known minister's attitude: According to McCulloch, his pastoral visits to the poor had acquainted him with the members of one family whose dire poverty so disturbed him that he sought to secure them emergency aid at the Center Township Trustee's office. There he learned, instead, of the family's—and their friends' and relatives'—long history of relief applications. At about the same time, he read a book about "the Jukes," a New York clan that reminded him of the family he visited in Indianapolis. The book's author, Richard L. Dugdale, a researcher interested in the causes of poverty and crime, had become curious about the frequency of family ties among inmates he encountered while inspecting county jails for the New York Prison Association. Although Dugdale's study of criminality among the Jukes (the fictitious surname by which he identified the clan) conceded that environmental factors were as influential as hereditary causes in "giving cumulative force to a career of debauch," McCulloch concluded that charitable aid targeted only at alleviating deficits such as hunger and homelessness encouraged the proliferation of degenerate families such as the Indianapolis clan, whom he labeled the Ishmaelites.3 He began to argue for compulsory social controls designed to prevent the "idle, wandering life" and "the propagation of similarly disposed children," and helped craft legislation to create the State Board of Charities and the Center Township Board of Children's Guardians. The collaboration he created between public and private charities infused the former—which gave relief without regard to an applicant's character—with the latter's strategy of giving based on moral merit.4 He reorganized the Indianapolis Benevolent Society as the Charity Organization Society (COS) and combined its efforts with those of Center Township relief caseworkers in order to identify citizens perceived to be making poverty their profession. Notes from interviews conducted and other public records gathered by these visitors of the poor were ultimately collected in McCulloch's family study, which was intended to provide evidence of "a constellation of degenerate behaviors—including alcoholism, pauperism, social dependency, shiftlessness, nomadism, and 'lack of moral control'" caused by inherited genetic defects and exacerbated by current charitable practice.5 The solution, McCulloch believed, was to "close up official out-door relief ... check private and indiscriminate benevolence, or charity, falsely so-called ... [and] get hold of the children."6 |
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